Monday 19/4/21
Although the hire company had given me a delivery slot of between 8am and 5pm, the Genie Lift arrived at 9am.
But there were a few jobs to before we could put it to use. I finished off the end of the tie beams with a plane. This left a few ‘plane ripples’ which I thought I’d leave as a talking point for when this barn is refurbished in about 500 years time!
After discussion we decided to pull the wall sill beam down further with the lorry straps to bring the shoulder of the top joint of the middle post in line with the shoulders of the short posts. This means that the end wall plate will sit level and we won’t have problems with the roof. I’m just a but worried that the bolts won’t be able to take the upward pressure when the lorry strap are removed. However, we will be able to leave the straps on for a few weeks and by that time some of the curve and the tension in the sill will have gone.
Next we set up a 3m straight edge level across what will be the first bay of the barn from the shoulder of the rear short post. From this we took a vertical measurement for the height of the first long post and cut the first post to length.
We drilled a 19mm hole in the base of the post going to great lengths – using a drill guide – to ensure that this hole was perfectly central in line with the post.
We applied tallow to the hole and screwed in the 20mm stainless steel bar using two nuts locked against each other. This worked really well.
With then screwed on the spacer plates Ben had made earlier and secured it with a stainless steel screw.
We took some time to find the correct braces to make up the rear wall of the first bay. Inadequate marking of the braces has been a problem with this project!
At the end of the day the slab looked like this. The Genie Lift was in place but as yet unused and I’d been charged with going through this blog and the images on Flickr to check we had the right braces. It shouldn’t come to this!
Hopefully tomorrow we will be able to lift this wall into place.